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121004-what-id-like-to-see-in-2015
Content ---- ---- Thanks for reading. :) I'm not sure I agree that dailies are the solution to the problem. I don't like feeling pressured to play the game in a monotonous, repetitive way. Content design that makes me want to do things is much better than content design that makes me feel like I have to. In a theme park MMO, dailies are like a roller coaster. You're stuck on rails doing what the game tells you to. Maybe you decide halfway that you don't really want to do that anymore, but the carrot at the end (amp and ability points, etc.) drives you on to keep doing something you don't really want to and no longer like. If you want to play an alt... well this is what it feels like (I guess I'm dating myself with that reference). I do agree with you wholeheartedly that better motivating carrots need to be in place. Part of that is why I proposed an open world PvP zone for competition. Players need to be funneled into encounters with one another for lots of different reasons, and PvP definitely is one. Put bottlenecks everywhere so they're pushed into proximity to others and watch the fireworks (or murderous bloody mayhem if you're on a PvP server). | |} ---- 1. Could be fun, but I think the deaths of our PvP servers pretty much proves this to be a waste of time and energy. 2. Agreed. Paths definitely need some expanding. 3. I know a lot of people disagree with me here, but I don't think this is an issue. Some people like the grind, some people don't. This is just a request of pure laziness. 4. They's comin'! I agree though. Getting to choose your first leveling zone is just a setup for major disappointment once you complete it then realize you no longer get a choice. 5. Like world bosses or events! Wait... 6. OMG this! No more throwing purple paint on everything. 7. Changes have been made and are currently being made to get away from crafting relevance. The theory that crafted gear was pre-raid BiS was just flat-out wrong, but it was comparable. Now, like any other game, any profession that crafts gear is pretty much useless. 8. Agreed here, too. Too many currency systems just starts becoming redundant. 9. Yes. We need in game events to break up the monotony of every day life on Nexus. 10. Very interesting idea. | |} ---- Yeah, dailies are a short-term, but certainly not long-term solution. The long term solution is, as both of us mentioned, true content in the open world that draws people of all levels into all areas. My feedback in that area delved into areas that differ between PVP and PVE servers, but utilize as many of the same assets as possible, so that PVE servers receive PVE areas in the same places PVP servers receive PVP areas that use as many of the same assets as they can. While I think that dailies that differ (such as Warhound getting a simple quest to kill Y players in X area and Entity getting a quest to kill Z rares and world bosses in X areas) might be a good solution in the short term to try to get people out into the open world looking for each other and getting people sorted onto the server they like, not the server that's the most statistically efficient, I do agree that it is not the optimal long term solution or enough on its own. More and larger content in that vein should be looked at and installed to really promote the difference between the servers. I simply think there should be some kind of short-term solution to fill the gap between that and new built content being added. | |} ---- I wholeheartedly disagree. The problem there is not that open world PvP isn't a draw - at launch the PvP servers were plentiful and populous. People do want it. However, with a really freakin' huge world, they're already at a disadvantage to find people to kill. Daily zones dry up when people finish their rep grinds. Battlegrounds and arenas grow stale when they're your only choices. A single open world PvP zone with incentives to come to is a bottleneck for encounters with other players. If it ties in to PvE by helping players who don't even PvP and never will, and gives a motivation to do it for fence-sitters who can take or leave PvP, then more PvP will happen overall. When someone hops in voice and yells out "OMG, the Dommies/Exiles are out in force today trying to take our is worth fighting over" people do actually come to that kind of fight. It's an endgame in and of itself, constantly changing and unlikely to get stale because they're encounters with people. You're missing the point. There are lots of fun classes in Wildstar to play, but if you feel like there's this enormous mountain of stuff ahead of you to get your character to be relevant, you won't want to alt at all. If there are no alts, there are no seasoned players out in the newbie zones to group with and the rare ones you will encounter are going to be soloing the content because much of it is too easy to need a group anyway if you know what you're doing. Mentoring is and always will be broken as long as there's no variety to the content and you're going to have to eat an expensive repair bill for dying with newbies while in your awesome raid set. Once you've put your work in on one character, the transition into maxing out others should be much easier so that trying new things is always fresh and fun. I have many alts, but only feel motivated to progress on one of them. That is a serious problem that needs to change if someone who loves alting to death doesn't even want to do it. It doesn't have to be that way. Dark Age of Camelot handled this very well. Crafted pieces were like glue that held your set together. A major goal of anyone's gear set was to max all resistances, but PvE drops had varying amounts of them and certainly wouldn't hit the goal if you just mashed them all together. You'd craft a few pieces (or commission custom work) to fill in all that stuff so that you hit your potential, and there was always room for improvement as you got new and better pieces. Crafted gear was never irrelevant. In Wildstar, people originally would stack their physical resistance because it was the only stat that needed to be. Now they stack armor instead because there aren't enough places where stacking resistances against tech or magic even makes sense (nor does having multiple sets of armor due to the huge number of slots to fill and the rarity of good pieces to fill them with). The rune system fills gaps that crafted gear used to in other games. However, there are places where Wildstar can again make crafted gear relevant. There are imbuements and specials all over. Most are just crap and need to be revamped or done away with entirely. If some imbuements are only available from some crafted pieces, then choices can be made by players. There's a hint of this already in that certain specials are quite nice and powerful on some dropped or crafted pieces. Ask any healer if they'd like to give up Reduced Burden and you'll hear a resounding "hell no!" Expand into this niche and crafting can be just as relevant and useful in some spaces as drops. No one method of obtaining gear should dominate all spaces. There are tons gear slots to fill, so give players a plethora of worthwhile options in crafted, dropped, and quest/challenge rewards and they'll feel empowered to make choices. | |} ---- Responses in bold. | |} ---- I mentioned a way to marry gearing straight to endgame with crafting in this treatise. I still wish they'd include it. It means crafting would always be relevant, but you wouldn't just be able to gear your way into the endgame. | |} ---- Amp and ability point progression for a character is clearly not "having it all." It's only one small step to progress. There can be many alternate routes of horizontal progress that make a game entertaining, but not for a character's base progression. Some people only PvP on one character that they happen to like the most for that role, and that may not be the one they raid on (loot distribution and raid group balancing around buffs/debuffs call for a few representatives from each class and players may get locked into a role). Think about what time gating those things means for PvP: people who got there first and put their time in are substantially better than you and in a way that is completely out of your control until you put the time in too. Time gating you to catch up to them just means you have no incentive to jump in at all when you're late to the party. Having all your amp and ability points is super important in that space, and you and I will never see eye to eye if that can't be acknowledged. Being locked out of your full potential due to time-gating skills and amps when you have to re-main because your raid needs it and you're willing to fill the role is similarly a problem. It's not like there's not other stuff you have to do to be better (gearing up, perfecting your rotation at a combat dummy, etc.). It's simply pointless and unnecessary and kills motivation, and motivation to do stuff is the commodity that makes the MMO world go 'round. I trade the time spent with you doing the stuff you want to do for the time you spend with me doing the stuff I want to do. If one of us is motivated and the other is not because the game design imbalances our motivations and our willingness to participate in the exchange, a game dies. | |} ---- I think the best solution here would be removing the weekly cap from EG. Remember, people were raiding GA and DS before they made AMPs/Abilities more readily available; while very, very nice to have, they are not absolutely necessary. The only place I see this causing a real problem is in PvP, but let's face it, that whole system needs to be trashed and redesigned. | |} ---- This is true, though there were a lot more people at the same point in the race. The problems become apparent long-term (deeper into raiding progression). My guild used to run three Warriors. One of them lost motivation and quit. Now there are two of us. I am DPS. The other would much prefer to tank and often does. I'm heavily geared up and have squashed a lot of power into my character with gear, serious effort into rune rerolling, and practice at the class to get the absolute most out of it that I can. Were I to quit and someone else need to be tapped to replace me, pretty much everyone else who has a Warrior only has one that's at level cap, but not attuned or played regularly enough to have all the amp and ability points. Completing rep grinds for these things are months out. Replacing gear is less of a problem as very little competition in the space means most of the gear goes to the new guy anyway. The new Glory system eases up on this quite a bit too. The cost of runing and re-rolling runes... well that's another can of worms but I've seen a dev post that Carbine's got eyes on easing that anyway. While I'd personally love for the EG cap to be removed on a really selfish level, I realize that the motivation to run most of the daily zones would evaporate overnight. I don't think that's something Carbine wants either since they did put a lot of effort into developing them and I think they'd like to see them continue to get used. As I understand it (I didn't play WoW), the easement of daily grinds was cut severely for alts in that game by making some account bound item purchasable the first go around that made alts get a multiplier added to the amount of rep received every day. That might be workable and acceptable if done correctly. I'm sure Carbine's got some ideas guys who can solve this issue in a way that satisfies the player base but doesn't obviate the motivation to run content. One way or another, I think it's a serious problem in need of a solid solution. Thanks for the civil, thoughtful conversation, by the way. | |} ---- You're so right about needing an incentive. When I was bored back on Pergo I'd just go to CB and start ganking some exiles but as time passed you'd notice there would be less and less people there, they would instead be afk in the main city. (Especially after Tuesday when people rush to hit EG cap.) If I ever heard, "Exiles are camping NW" I'd think to myself, "Well...time to switch to my warrior." That's when people would come out of their main city and start fighting for a bit, until one side eventually left or people got bored. It would die down for a bit, people would quest, and then it would happen again. We need more reasons to fight in the open world. Besides the fact that the exiles have turned their backs on Dominus. | |} ---- ---- I think most people are using the daily zones for the overcap gold conversion instead. Without the cap or some system to replace it, their income would drop substantially. | |} ---- ---- ---- I can't say that I agree. I don't get angry at dying. Instead, this is what I see: The stepping stones are my deaths. Without them, I wouldn't get across the river. Without the river, there would be nothing worth crossing or another side to explore. | |} ---- But the challenging content IS the main selling point of Wildstar If you take that away, then this game becomes a WoW-clone with space furries. Can you honestly say THAT game would be more appealing to anyone? | |} ---- It is not selling. | |} ---- It actually sold better than they projected, what you mean is that it's not retaining, and that can be (and as stated is) not directly related to difficulty. A lot of people who commented before Carbine implemented an exit survey bought the game for the difficulty and left because they had to run veteran dungeons for weeks to get a viable upgrade because of the layers of RNG on RNG, and needed a gold medal just for a shot at that. Carbine's fixing the latter issues. | |} ---- I just wanted to poke my nose in here and comment on a few things you laid out up above Tess :) 1) One of my biggest complaints about PvP in Wildstar is that it doesn't feel meaningful - sure, the Exiles and Dominion are fighting, but over what? I like what you have posted but I would take it a step further - rather than confining it to individual zones, I'd like to see most areas of the world have PvP objectives that are fought over by players. For each objective that's captured for one side or the other, apply a global buff to that faction - experience, reputation, money, etc. On PvE servers, don't auto-flag, but on PvP servers, it's open season. Not only would this potentially entice more people to do PvP, I think it would help revitalize the PvP servers some. 2) You spent a lot of time talking about settlers. While I agree with what you said, I think all the paths could use some love, both in terms of content for them to do, and in terms of group utility. A path should be more than an individual choice - you should get excited when you get an explorer in the group because "oh awesome now we can open those relic caches" or something like that. 3) While there are certainly some convenience things that could be added, the most important thing for me when it comes to alts is having alternate content path(s) that they can go through. I really dislike the fact that my alts have to do the exact same quests as my first character all the way up to 50. However, this is also really hard to fix now that the game has shipped. I do hope they start on it though. 4) Crafting has several problems that aren't the sole fault of the crafting system. - The way that stats work encourages players to pile everything into a single attribute. However crafted gear is very obviously set up so that it's most efficient to spread points between 2 or 3 attributes. The reason that a lot of crafting schematics seem worthless is that they don't have the right circuit layout for boosting a single stat up very very high. As long as this is the case, the usability of crafted items will always be limited. - There are a bunch of crafted items out there with mislinked specials. So you get healer specials on heavy armor, and so on. - The circuit layout on some crafted items is simply wrong for the type of item it's making. For example, heavy armor with more than one green circuit. This is impacted by my first bullet however. - There are honestly too few schematics in a lot of professions at each level range. Ideally, each gear-making profession should have schematics that allow it to produce gear catered to each class/spec that uses that item. So for example, outfitters should have enough variety in their schematics that they can produce sets of equipment for stalker DPS, stalker tank, medic DPS, and medic healing (four different combinations of stats). Right now, they can't really do that. - As it stands right now, green power cores are worthless, and at high levels, the only power cores that matter are those that provide multiple rune slots. There are also too few varieties of power cores. I'm not excited when I salvage a power core out of something. There ideally should be rare power cores at each crafted tier that can make really unique items. - Don't get me started on technologist/architect crafting. We'll be here all day. So in short, I agree with you that crafting needs a lot of work. But it's also tied to other areas of the game that need work as well. It's a big project. ...and, gotta go to work. Great post, thank you for putting it up! | |} ---- This is what keeps me going; it's not heartbreaking, it's the carrot! I get pumped up every time something kicks my ass. Finally, a challenge! Yes, the difficulty might be driving some people away, but, as I've said before, I'd rather see WildStar remain a unique and challenging game with a low pop than turn into "Generic MMO #627." Wildstar offers an opportunity to challenge yourself in a way that no other game does; an opportunity that only comes around a couple times per decade. A game for gamers. The devs here actually want to push our limits and not just suck our wallets dry... how is that a bad thing? This was billed as a difficult game and I think a lot of the delusionals who've been pampered by the last decade of games are finally realizing that they're not nearly as good as they thought they were. But the majority of these people would rather blame Carbine for it being too hard than take a look at themselves and say, "Maybe I'm the one who's doing a terrible job here," then strive to improve. It's like everyone is perfect, and whenever that perfection is challenged, the blame lies with the challenger. Nobody here is "King Shit" so get over yourselves and enjoy the challenge or go feed your fragile little egoes on more toddler games. | |} ----